An Affair (Jeon-Sa)
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An Affair (Jeon-Sa) Dir: Yi Jae-Yong, South Korea, 1999 Happy End (Hae-P’i-En-Teu) Happy End (Hae-P’i-En-Teu) Dir. Jung Ji-Woo, South Korea, 1999 A review by Teo Kia Choong, National University of Singapore As a nation state isolated from outside influences until contact with the USA after the Korean War in the 1950s, the ethnic-cultural homogeneity of South Korean society is a factor which warrants much attention for us, a contemporary audience, even while we view its cinematic exports. Over six centuries of a neo-Confucian system of government until Japanese occupation in 1910, during which the estates of Korean society became increasingly slanted towards the male chauvinist values of 'nam jeon yo bi' ('nan zun nui bei' in Chinese, meaning 'man/superior, woman/inferior'), have affirmed the primacy of men in the working world and societal-familial roles alike as opposed to the silence and subservience of women. Not surprisingly, the stifling political atmosphere of censorship in South Korean society from the early 1960s to the 1980s -- chiefly a result of strict dictatorial rule under the successive governments led by Presidents Syngman Rhee and then Chung Hee Park -- has additionally contributed to affirming the strict moral-social taboos on the public viewing and screening of sexual intimacy and sexual subject matter. The cinema of the 1990s and early twenty-first century in South Korea can be seen to represent a clear change in the degree of laxity awarded to films with regard to depictions of sexual activity on screen. Although the screening of genitalia and occasional blunt violence is still forbidden under South Korea's Media Ratings Board in commercial and art-house films alike, these pressures are often pitted as controversies more than decisive actions of censorship since, in practice, the Media Ratings Board has no direct power to cut or ban a film per se. Here the change in South Korea's reigning generation of auteur-directors, such as Jang Sun-Woo who tackled the subject of sado-masochism in Lies (1999) and Im Sang-Soo who dealt with women's sexual fantasies in Girls' Night Out (1999), often mark a concerted attempt to breach the formal boundaries imposed on artists by the Media Ratings Board. If this sudden surge of liberalism and 'free love' is shown by mainstream auteurs, experimental directors like Jung Ji-Woo and Yi Jae-Yong, who have studied in the film institutes of today's South Korea, have shown a similar predilection towards the testing these boundaries of censorial pressures. The directorial debuts of Jung Ji-Woo and Yi Jae-Yong, Happy End (1999) and An Affair (1998), reflect the current destabilization of the traditional neo-Confucian stress on female subservience to her husband and family, the nuclear family unit governed by a patriarchal figure (normally the father-husband), and of marital fidelity under the influence of Western liberal values. As these two films reveal in their immediate historical context, where issues like adultery and sexual infidelity were direct affronts to social consciousness and political correctness in a military dictatorship of the 1960s and 1970s, they are now brought to the forefront for the audience's consumption in the 1990s, thus marking a 'new' surge of vigor in South Korean cinema in the forays into once-taboo subjects. A perennial excuse for adultery is the prevalent dissatisfaction on either spouse's part with the institution of heterosexual marriage, and the ennui into which it devolves after the period of honeymoonal bliss. As films dealing with the subject of adultery, Happy End and An Affair explore the ambiguities that beset spouses' desire to relieve innate feelings of boredom through these illicit relationships, and the conservative social mechanism that punishes these adulterers (or adulteresses). Placed especially in the neo-Confucian sexual climate of South Korea, which has traditionally emphasized the Sinicized values of 'san chong si de' (literally 'three submissions and four virtues literally') for women and the man's need to provide for the family through industrious work, these two films reveal the inherent destructiveness of sexual passions to be equal to the burdens of social boredom. While the ennui inherent to the routine lifestyle of heterosexual marriage supposedly leads its protagonists to turn to the excitements of an illicit affair, closure in the form of a happy end is, however, never guaranteed. Instead it deteriorates into this form of jouissance, an addictive desire for sex that does not abate. Both of these films, while testing the limits of on-screen sexual intimacy in South Korean cinema, simultaneously affirms conventional sexual-moral ethos in South Korea. An affair hardly promises a happy end, and, in fact, distances one from it. As a case in point, both films meticulously recreate the repetitious compulsions inherent in the everyday to highlight the boredom associated with conventional marriage. In An Affair, Yi Jae-Yong manages this through disjunctive jump-cuts among images associated with familial warmth and order, of the adulteress So-Hyun executing her household duties. She repetitively pre-packs Ziploc bags of fresh meats and vegetables for the fridge. She rearranges the rock specimens that adorn her living room daily despite their already neat arrangements. She lies snugly in bed beside her husband after having sexual intercourse and, in a moment of stark silence for her, tries to talk to him about household matters only to discover that he has fallen asleep. She drives her son to school daily, asking the routine set of questions as to when he will be released from school for the afternoon. In a Warholesque fashion, the camera constantly repeats the same image of a car's front window against the background of a clear day amidst the traffic lights, denoting the boredom of the quotidian. By contrast, Happy End highlights this boredom of everyday married life in the portrayal of a destabilized nuclear family -- one where traditional gender roles of male/breadwinner and female/housewife are inverted. Day in and day out, the main characters of Seo Min-Ki (the husband) and Choi Bo-Ra (the wife) live their lives wishing for an avenue of escape. We are shown Min-Ki interviewing for jobs daily, in between his typing out neat résumés and cutting empty milk cartons for recycling. In between these mundane hours, he hogs the corners of the second-hand bookshop reading his favorite romance and mystery novels. An early scene establishes the action of the owner trying to drive him out of the bookshop because of his refusal to buy the books until he has finished reading them. Min-Ki, however, continues reading the book with devout attention. The camera then cuts to another scene of him reading in the park, wiping a tear from his cheek when moved by the novel's sentimental plot. Through escape into the narrative world as a reader, Min-Ki therefore obtains temporary respite from his everyday burdens, namely the dour reality of unemployment and economic reliance on his wife. By opposition, his wife, Bo-Ra, relieves such feelings of ennui through adultery. The thrill of the affair is treated by her as that of a game of how best to play thief and not to be discovered in the act. By day, she is a career woman at a foreign language centre promoting the efficacy of its language training courses; at night, she becomes a wild woman in sexual foreplay with her lover Kim Il-Beom, allowing herself to be photographed in the nude. The ten-minute sexual tryst that plays as part of the opening credits may be audacious, but reminds us that it is precisely in the affront that adultery offers to conventional sexual morality that individuals find insulation against the dulling effects of the everyday. Additionally, denials of the affair are always conducted by either pretending that it never really happened, or that it can be terminated as and when one prefers -- ironically this has the effect of reinforcing the affair. The characters' belief that a return to the 'normalcy' of the quotidian is always possible after an affair is a premise which both films demonstrate to be fallacious and self-destructive. In An Affair, this is revealed in the sibling tensions between So-Hyun and her younger sister, Ji-Hyun, who both vacillate between attempts to end their relationships with Yu-In (Ji-Hyun's fiancée) and attempts to sustain that desire. The early half of the film reveals So-Hyun promising her sister to take care of Yu-In in her absence, to the extent of sharing his bed as his lover. But upon her younger sister's return from the United States, which constitutes the latter half of the plot, she refuses to be intimate with him openly or to talk to him. The portrayal of Ji-Hyun, as an emotionally tormented sibling who abides by the traditional axiom "do not wash your dirty linen in public", itself affirms the fallacy of thinking that an affair can ever be denied with ease. In a crucial scene where Yu-In declares his sudden decision to return to Los Angeles before So-Hyun and her family, the scene is charged with a stifling and uneasy atmosphere, as So-Hyun watches Yu-In hanging his arms around Ji- Hyun's shoulders affectionately. Any possibility of the characters returning to a life of familial harmony is demonstrated as wishful thinking here. As the audience, we have already witnessed a terse, silent confrontation between Yu-In and Ji-Hyun prior to this, where he confesses his change of love for another.